It took him only three hours, but here we are: Microsoft's Kinect motion controller thing for the Xbox360 has been hacked, and a preliminary open source driver has been made available for Linux. According to the hacker in question, it was surprisingly simple.

The hack and driver comes courtesy of Hector 'marcan' Martin, and has been dubbed Libfreenect, and has been released under version 2 or 3 of the GPL. Both the depth and ordinary camera work, and even though a lot of work still needs to be done, it's impressive it only took a few hours to get where we are now.

One of the major problems right now is the audio chip. "The audio chip (the Marvell) requires firmware and more init and does a TON of stuff including the crypto authentication to prove that it is an original Kinect and not a clone," marcan writes, "Who knows what this thing does to the incoming audio. This should be interesting to look at."